Day of Confession (23 page)

61

Rome. 6:30
A.M
.

HARRY WALKED TOWARD THE COLOSSEUM, head down, unmindful of the rush of morning traffic passing on the Via dei Fori Imperiali beside him. At this point, motion was everything. The only way to keep from losing what small splinter of sanity he had left. Cars. Buses. Motor scooters. Roared and putted past. An entire society going about their own personal business, their thoughts and emotions focused wholly and innocently on the day before them, the same way he had every morning of his professional life until he had come to Rome. It had been as routine and comfortable as old shoes.

Up at six, exercise for an hour in the gym off his bedroom, shower, breakfast meeting with clients or potential clients, and into the office, cell phone never more than inches away, even in the shower. The same as now. Cell phone right there, in his pocket. Only it wasn’t the same. None of it. The cellular phone was there, but he dared not use it. They could trace it back in an instant to whatever close-by cell site he was using, and the whole area would be filled with police before he knew it.

Suddenly he walked from bright sun to deep shade. Looking up, he saw that he stood in the shadow of the Colosseum. As quickly, his eye caught a movement in the dimness, and he stopped. A woman in a tattered dress stood watching from the base of the ancient arches. Then another stepped in beside her. And then a third, this one holding a baby. Gypsies.

Turning, he saw there were more. Eight or ten at least, and they were beginning to encircle him. Closing in slowly. Singly, and in twos and threes. All were women, and most had children in tow. Quickly Harry glanced back toward the street. There was no one. No grounds-keepers. No tourists. No one.

Suddenly he felt a tug on his pants, and he glanced down. An old woman was lifting his pant leg, looking at his shoes. Jerking back, he stepped away from her. It did no good. Another woman was right there. Younger, grinning. Her front teeth gone. One hand held up for money, the other reaching out to caress the material of his trousers. That he seemed to be a priest made no difference. Then something brushed his back and a hand went for his wallet.

In one motion he whirled, his own hand flashing out, coming up hard with a piece of material, dragging a wildly shrieking young woman up with it. The others shrank back, frightened, uncertain what to do. All the while the woman in his grasp thrashed and wailed, screaming as if she were being murdered. Abruptly Harry pulled her close. His face inches from hers.

“Hercules,” he said, quietly, “I want to find Hercules.”

THE DWARF SAT with one hand on his hip, the other holding his chin, staring intently at Harry. It was just past noon, and they were on a bench in a small, dusty square across the Tiber in the Gianicolo section of Rome. Midday traffic rumbled past on a boulevard at the square’s farthest boundary. But that was the extent of it; other than two elderly men on a bench farther down, they were alone. Except that Harry knew the Gypsies were there, somewhere, out of sight, watching.

“Because of you, the police found my tunnel. Because of you, I now live outdoors instead of in. Thank you very much.” Hercules was angry, and put out, literally.

“I’m sorry…”

“Yet here you are again. Back, I think, looking for help instead of the other way around.”

“Yes.”

Hercules deliberately looked off. “What do you want?”

“You, to follow someone. Two people, actually. You and the Gypsies.”

Hercules looked back. “Who?”

“A cardinal and a priest. People who know where my brother is… who will lead me to him.”

“A cardinal?”

“Yes.”

Hercules suddenly pulled a crutch under him and stood up. “No.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“With what?”

“Money.”

“How are you going to get it?”

“I have it….” Harry hesitated, then took Eaton’s money from his pocket. “How much do you want? How much for you and the Gypsies?”

Hercules looked at the money, then at Harry. “That’s more than I gave you. Where did you get it?”

“I got it—that’s all…. How much do you want?”

“More than that.”

“How much more?”

“You can get it?” Hercules was surprised.

“I think so…”

“If you can get so much money, why don’t you ask the people giving it to you to follow the cardinal?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why?—Can’t trust them?”

“Hercules, I’m asking for your help. I’m willing to pay for it. And I know you need it…”

Hercules said nothing.

“Before, you said you could not collect the reward on me because you would have to go to the police for it…. Money can help get you off the street.”

“Frankly, Mr. Harry, I would just as soon not be seen with you. The police want you. The police want me. We’re bad company. Twice as bad when we’re together…. I need you as a lawyer, not a banker. When you can do that, come back. Otherwise,
arrivederci
.”

Indignantly, Hercules grabbed for his other crutch. But Harry beat him to it and snatched it away.

Hercules’ eyes flashed angrily. “That’s not a very good idea.”

Harry ignored his protest. “Before, you said you wanted to see what I could do. How far my wits and courage would take me. This is how far, Hercules. In a big circle, right back to you…. I tried, it just didn’t work…” Harry’s voice softened, and he looked at Hercules for a long moment, then ever so slowly gave him back his crutch.

“I can’t do it alone, Hercules…. I need your help.”

Harry’s last words were barely out when the cellular phone rang in his jacket pocket, its shrill intrusion startling them both.

“—Yes… ,” Harry answered warily, his eyes darting around the park, as if this were a trick, the police on to him.

“Adrianna!” Quickly Harry turned away, covering his free ear against the sound of the traffic on the boulevard.

Hercules swung up on his crutches, watching intently.

“
Where?
” Harry nodded once, then twice. “—Okay. Yes! I understand. What color?—Okay, I’ll find it.”

Snapping off the phone, Harry slid it into his pocket, at the same time looking to Hercules.

“How do I get to the main railroad station?”

“Your brother—“

“He’s been seen.”

“Where?” Hercules could feel the excitement.

“In the north. A town on Lake Como.”

“That’s five hours by train through Milan. Too long. You would risk being—“

“I’m not going by train. Someone has a car waiting for me at the railroad station.”

“A car…”

“Yes.”

Hercules glared at him. “So, suddenly you have other friends and don’t need me.”

“I need you to tell me how to get to the station.”

“Find it yourself.”

Harry stared at the dwarf, incredulous. “First you want nothing to do with me, now you’re mad because I don’t need you.”

Hercules said nothing.

“I
will
find it myself.” Abruptly Harry turned and walked off.

“Wrong way, Mr. Harry!”

Harry stopped and looked back.

“You see, you
do
need me.”

The wind picked up Harry’s hair, and dust danced past his feet. “All right. I need you!”

“All the way to Lake Como!”

Harry glared. “All right!”

In an instant Hercules was up and swinging toward him. Then he was past him, calling over his shoulder.

“This way, Mr. Harry.
This
way!”

62

Lake Como, Italy. Monday, July 13, 4:30
P.M
.

ROSCANI TURNED TO LOOK AT SCALA AND Castelletti in the seats behind him, then with a glance at the jet-helicopter’s pilot, turned back to stare out the window. They had been flying for nearly three hours, north along the Adriatic coast, over the cities of Ancona, Rimini, and Ravenna, then inland toward Milan, and finally north again to drop down over the high hills and sweep across Lake Como toward the town of Bellagio.

Below, he could see the tiny white wakes of pleasure boats cutting the deep blue of the lake’s surface like decorations on a cake. To his left, a dozen opulent villas surrounded by manicured gardens dotted the shoreline, and to his right, the steep hillsides dropped sharply to the lake itself.

They’d been still in Pescara at the scene of the apartment house fire when he’d taken an urgent call from Taglia. A man thought to be Father Daniel Addison had been brought to a private villa on Lake Como by chartered hydrofoil the night before, Gruppo Cardinale’s chief had said. The hydrofoil captain had seen the broadcast of the continuing public appeal messages on television and was all but certain who his passenger was. Yet he’d been reluctant to say anything because the villa was very exclusive and he was afraid he might lose his job if he was wrong and accidentally exposed a celebrity of some kind. But then sometime this morning his wife had convinced him he should notify the authorities and let them make the decision.

Celebrity, Roscani thought as the pilot banked sharply left and dropped lower over the water; who the hell cared who got exposed if they were on the right track? Time was more critical than ever.

The body found in the rubble had been that of Giulia Fanari, the wife of Luca Fanari, the man who, records had shown, had rented an ambulance from the slain proprietors of the ambulance company in Pescara. Signora Fanari had been dead before the fire began. Killed by a sharp instrument, probably an ice pick, inserted into the skull at the base of the brain. For all intents she was “pithed,” the way a biologist might dispatch a frog he was about to dissect.
Cold blooded
wasn’t a description. From the way it had been done, it appeared to Roscani to have been an act performed almost passionately, as if, with each involuntary squirm and muscular jolt the victim gave as her brain was slowly and deliberately crushed inside her skull, the killer was enjoying it. Maybe even sexually. If nothing else, the sheer inventiveness of the act told him the perpetrator was a person with absolutely no concept of conscience. A true sociopath who had complete indifference to the feelings, pain, or well-being of other people. A human being truly evil from birth. And if this sociopath was their illusory
third person
, Roscani could eliminate the “they” of it, because everything told him the murder had been done by one person alone, and he could eliminate the “she” as well, because it would have taken enormous strength to kill Giulia Fanari the way it had been done, meaning, almost without doubt, the creature who did it was a man. And if he had been in Pescara on the trail of Father Daniel and, through his doings there, had learned where he had been taken, it would mean he was a great deal closer to finding Father Daniel than they were.

Which was why, as Roscani watched the ground come up quickly, abruptly becoming obscured in a cloud of dust as the helicopter set down at the edge of a thick woods near the lake, he prayed to God that the injured man delivered to the villa was indeed the priest, and that they would get there first—before the man with the ice pick.

63

THE SCOPE WAS A 1.5–4.5 × ZEISS DIAVARI C, and through it Thomas Kind watched the dark blue Alfa Romeo come down the hill toward Bellagio. The crosshairs cut Castelletti in the middle of his forehead, and a slight shift to the left took Roscani the same way. Then, after a glimpse of a
carabiniere
at the wheel, the vehicle passed, and he stood back. He was uncertain if today he should once again call himself
S
, because he was not sure whether logistics or circumstance would present him with his target.

S
for
sniper
. It was a designation he gave himself when he prepared, mentally and physically, to kill from a distance. It had begun as a self-promotion to an elite corps after his first kill, shooting a fascist soldier from an office window in Santiago, Chile, in 1976, as the troops opened fire on a gathering of Marxist students.

Moving the Zeiss down and to the right, he saw the
carabinieri
command post set up just outside the long formal drive leading to the palatial lakeside estate known as Villa Lorenzi. A move to the right again, and the scope picked up the three police patrol boats idle in the water, a quarter of a mile apart and a hundred yards offshore.

Through Farel, Kind had learned that Villa Lorenzi was owned by the renowned Italian novelist Eros Barbu and that Barbu was traveling in western Canada and had not been at Villa Lorenzi since the previous New Year’s Eve, when he had given his annual ball, one of the most famous events in all of Europe. In Barbu’s absence, Villa Lorenzi was managed by a black South African poet named Edward Mooi, who lived free of charge, saw after the buildings, and directed the staff of twenty full-time house help and gardeners. And Mooi, at Eros Barbu’s order, had given the police permission to search the grounds.

A formal statement from Barbu’s attorneys maintained that neither Barbu nor Edward Mooi ever knew or had heard of a Father Daniel Addison, and that neither they nor any of the staff were aware of anyone coming to Villa Lorenzi by boat. Most certainly not someone with a medical staff of four tending him.

Easing back from his craggy perch on a wooded hill overlooking the villa, Thomas Kind lifted the scope again and saw Roscani’s Alfa Romeo pull up to the command post just as Edward Mooi came down from the main house at the wheel of a battered three-wheel maintenance vehicle that looked like an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle towing the bed of a small dump truck.

Kind smiled. The poet was wearing a khaki shirt, western jeans, and leather sandals. His long hair, tied in a ponytail that dropped to his shoulders, had touches of gray at the temples and gave him the appearance of a distinguished hippie or an aging biker.

For a moment Mooi and Roscani chatted, then the poet climbed back on his vehicle and led Roscani’s car and two large trucks filled with armed
carabinieri
back up the driveway and onto the grounds of the villa proper. Thomas Kind was certain the police would find nothing. But he was equally certain that his target was somewhere there, or at a place close by. So he would wait and watch, and then make his move. Patience was everything.

Hefei, China. The Overseas Chinese Hotel.

Tuesday, July 14
.

Li Wen rolled over, restless. It was hot and still, and he was unable to sleep. Thirty seconds later he rolled over again and looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty in the morning. In three hours he would have to get up. In four he would be at work. He lay back. This night, more than any, he needed to sleep, but it didn’t come. He tried to erase thought from his mind, not think of what he was about to do, or what Hefei would be like twenty-four hours from now after he had introduced the deadly product of American hydro-biologist James Hawley’s formula to the water supply at the treatment plant’s clear-water outflow wells. Polycyclic unsaturated alcohol was not a monitored constituent in the water systems, nor could it be detected visually or by taste or odor in the drinking water. Introduced in frozen snowball-like form to melt in the already-treated water, the effect would be to cause severe digestive-system cramping, followed by intense diarrhea, and, ultimately, intestinal bleeding and death within six to twenty-four hours. The amount introduced, calculated at ten-parts-per-million concentration in a glass of drinking water, would have sufficient fatal contamination for one hundred thousand individuals.

Ten parts per million
.

One hundred thousand deaths
.

Li Wen tried to stop his mind from working, but he could not. Then, in the distance, he heard the crackle of thunder. At almost the same time he felt a breeze and saw the curtains billow slightly at the open window. A front was approaching, and with it would come wind and warm rain. By the time he got up it should have passed, and tomorrow would be muggy and even hotter. Not-so-distant lightning flashed, for an instant lighting up his hotel room. Eight seconds later there was a clap of thunder.

Li Wen moved up on an elbow, alert, his gaze crossing the room. In the corner next to his suitcase was a small refrigerator. Few hotels in China had room refrigerators, especially hotels in the smaller cities like Hefei, away from the major centers, but this one did. It was the reason he had chosen this hotel and asked for this room. Not only was there a refrigerator, but the appliance itself had a freezer, which was even more important because it was where he had frozen the polycyclic “snowballs” after he had blended the formula. And where they would remain until he left for the treatment plant in something over three hours.

Again lightning flashed. For an instant the lights illuminating the hotel sign outside his window went out, then they came back on. Li Wen was wide awake now. Staring in the dark. The last thing he needed was to have the electricity go out.